


the innermost infinity

by diktynna



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Character Death, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Incest, Incest, Recurrences, The Harvest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 15:39:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3387134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diktynna/pseuds/diktynna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Their temples are self-built, gleaming chrome and reinforced glass that kept out the darkness of space, that vast terribleness that swallowed people whole. They make their own houses out of bones and blood and dust. They make their houses into their own bodies, each cell made out of a hundred thousand cells-that-had-been. Bone out of piles of bones, blood out of rivers of blood.</i>
</p><p>Twelve steps in the cycle of eternity with the Abrasax family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the innermost infinity

“Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil. But the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.  
The operation of the whole is Abrasax, to whom only the ineffective standeth opposed.”  
 _Seven Sermons to the Dead_ , C. G. Jung, 1916  
  
  
  
  
 _sophia :: the knowledge of what we will become_  
  
In the beginning, there were gods who were made of stars and darkness and there were people made out of meat and thought.  
  
In the beginning, they decided: who was to say that they could not be gods, too?  
  
Their temples are self-built, gleaming chrome and reinforced glass that kept out the darkness of space, that vast terribleness that swallowed people whole. They make their own houses out of bones and blood and dust. They make their houses into their own bodies, each cell made out of a hundred thousand cells-that-had-been. Bone out of piles of bones, blood out of rivers of blood.  
  
Dust — that smallest and last piece of the human body, sloughed skin cells bunched together to form a mote that danced in the light — that turns into more dust, into more skin cells to be sloughed off, far, far from their home.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_monogenes :: the only begotten_

  
You wonder who you will be this time. You know that the dust of ages has no consciousness, but you like to think that there’s a direction that it takes. A mechanism that moves through the ages, shaping and perfecting things each cycle.  
  
You will not know the events of your own two-week long funeral until after, how one son loses half of his throat to a dog, the other has the inheritance contracts pulled up before it’s even half over, and the middle child smiles serenely in the chaos around her.  
  
You don’t know the child that you will be next, but you hope that she will be strong enough to do what’s necessary.  
  
She will have to be. You have decided that this has to stop, and an Abrasax keeps her word. That much will have to matter.  
  
Your genetic code flows through space, making its way from your estates to that blue and green planet that was given to you billions of years ago.  
  
When Jupiter Jones is born, millions of miles from where her previous self dies, there is nothing of words in her mind or promises to keep. She is a child, like every one of her that came before was a child, like the you who once was a child and the one before this form they call Seraphi.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_bythios :: the unseeable deep_

The dust shakes free from the walls, plaster and paint shuddering beneath the weight of fire. Booted feet come closer. The animals have knowledge now, they have broken free from their farms, and they are coming for the architect.  
  
She holds her children close and focuses on the feeling of their silky hair beneath her frantic hands. This is not the end, even though her heart pounds — it has beaten for forty thousand years, and should beat for forty thousand more, but she suspects that this will be the night this heart beats its last and, when her heart beats again, it will be a new heart, reconstructed from the atoms in the universe arranged in such a way as to create her once again.  
  
“Hush,” she whispers, a strain of a long-forgotten lullaby humming through her head.  
  
The Unbegotten Father is dead, the first of them to have died and come back, the first of this new system of Recurrences. There are many family members who are somewhere in the cycle between this form and the next, but he was the very first. Great-aunts whispered about how he forced a Recurrence, not wanting to wait for the course of history. He created himself out of his own flesh, weaving his genetic code back together, to make sure that it would work before he shared the idea with anyone else.  
  
He came back so quickly, younger than she had ever remembered seeing him.  
  
And now he is dead again, the one known only as Abrasax. They took his genetic code and they shredded it.  
  
They, the highest of the new gods, can still die. Immortality of the vessel was never part of their genes. Immortality is for the spirit, for the unchanging atoms that will spiral out into the universe. There is a piece of each of them in one of the Seedings, the sequences that will create them anew. They will only have to find each other once again.  
  
Once they do, she will make sure that everything goes right. She whispers this promise in this dark closet where she knows they will end this existence at the hands of men belonging to the Eleleth or Barbelo families, and she will make them pay.  
  
She promises, and an Abrasax always keeps her promises.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_anthropos :: the human component_

You have heard the name before, as a god, as a demon, as a power unbound by any form. Abraxas. Abrasax. It’s an error made in a translation centuries ago, but it’s an error that keeps catching at your brain.  
  
You run a hand over the page, over the engraved letters, worrying at this splinter wrought in ink and gold leaf on thin sheepskin. In the middle of the night, you are the only one here in this room of the abbey of the Order of Dragons. It’s a small room, only found by those who have been here for years.  
  
You have been here three days. You know the way from your cell to the cathedral where the great skeleton of a god hangs from the ceiling, bound together with golden wire, its bones gleaming white and polished every week. No one knows how old the bones are, but there are stories that people first found them thousands of years ago, lying on the plains, half-buried in the ground. Dead gods, for that was the only thing they could be, and one day, the scriptures said, they would rise again.  
  
Abraxas. Abrasax.  
  
The page, skin-soft, catches on your thumb. You jerk back and smother your cry; it’s the middle of the night and no one will look upon you kindly if they found you here.  
  
There’s blood on the page, and then there’s not. It disappears into the lazuli blue letters, and then the world around you fades into lazuli blue light.  
  
When you open your eyes, you’re in a place that you’ve never imagined.  
  
A woman stands in front of you, her dark hair curled and piled on the top of her head. Her dress is made of starlight and she holds her hands out to you.  
  
“My dear brother,” she says, gemstones on her eyes. “Welcome home. We had begun to despair of ever finding you.”  
  
Behind you, on the earth below, the people are beginning to vanish. Later, you will learn that the term Harvest has a different meaning for your family.  
  
For now, the woman calling you her brother loops her arm through your own. She slides a look at you beneath her dark eyelashes.  
  
“You’re very young,” she says. “I think this time you can be my son. Or my nephew. Whatever you want. It’s Ptahil this time, correct?”  
  
Relationships, you will find in the House of Abrasax, are very loosely defined when one can be reborn countless times in the same form. The only constant is that they are Abrasaxes, and they are family, no matter what they call each other.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_mixis :: the lady, commingling in herself_

This particular system is still within its technological infancy. It doesn’t even show up on the maps. Overlooked and underdeveloped, it passes from one hand to another, the latest owner an Abrasax. They say she won it at a game of cards. It’s commonplace to put up estates and farms as collateral, but no one has ever put up an empty system.  
  
It goes against everything that they believe in. It goes against every good business practice and against basic common sense. An empty system is a useless system, a dead system.  
  
Unless.  
  
There is one reason that particular Abrasax did not stand up and walk away from the card table, insulted at the very notion.  
  
That one reason has: an eccentricity of 0.016 710 22, one natural satellite, an orbital speed of nearly 30 kilometres per hour, and takes just over three hundred, sixty-five, and one quarter days to complete a rotation around the star at the centre of this system.  
  
That one reason is a small, blue and green planet, third in the system, where there is enough potential to seed life.  
  
There are still many, many years to wait. But time doesn’t matter.  
  
There is another planet in this system, one with a giant, red hurricane on its surface, that has caught the eye of Lady Abrasax and been the subject of inferences to her husband. Soon there will be a vacation estate on this red planet, from which they can watch the current inhabitants of her planet grow until it is time to get rid of them.  
  
The other Lady Abrasax knows that this child system will flourish, given time, and will become a jewel among the family’s holdings. She thinks that her wife will be very pleased with this new system she has won at cards. The Eleleth patriarch thinks that he’s pulled one over on them and he will be very rudely surprised come several quarter profit reports from now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_henosis :: union, that can be torn asunder_

He has silver in his hair that won’t come out by the time she is born. There is only so much that science can do, and his body can only take so much.  
  
He holds her in his arms. She’s an awfully quiet child, this girl who holds one of the richest farms in the universe.  
  
“Jushamin!”  
  
His lip curls up in reflex at her shrill voice. By the time his wife (beloved wife, beloved, that is what the vows said this time, and it had made so much sense and will make them both so much more money) has entered the room, he is sitting in an overstuffed chair with their daughter on his lap. Her tiny fingers wrap around one of his own. He absolutely doesn’t think of how easy it would be to break her neck.  
  
Or of whom the neck would belong to.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_akinetos :: the immovable met by the irresistible_

The giants are gone now. Scales and feathers demolished by fire from the heavens.  
  
She wonders what they thought when they saw the blast coming, if they thought at all. Were they cognizant of their own demise?  
  
Are they cognizant of anything?  
  
The Harvesters are down there, on that blue and green planet turned grey and gloomy by the effects of a volcanic winter. She will have to tell her cousin that he was right about the movability of the plates, how they crashed together and liquid fire flew.  
  
 _Earth_ , Duchess Abrasax says in her mind. She shapes the syllables with her mouth, but doesn’t say it aloud yet. It’s still a secret, promised years ago in a different Recurrence, but promised all the same. Great-Uncle is an Abrasax, and an Abrasax keeps their word, as her mother was always fond of saying while brushing Duchess Abrasax’s hair when she was small.  
  
This world will be hers. In time, the Harvesters will return. Instead of picking at corpses for the leavings of genetic material, they will turn everything to dust. Duchess Abrasax, once-wife, now-niece, will love her planet dearly. It will not fall into the hands of her grasping boy cousins.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_autophues :: self-existence is its own evidence_

Pot sherds. You are always finding pot sherds and nothing more. Day after day, you sit in this city, where east and west meet, and sort through pot sherds. You glue together the remains of a society long dead. Your shoulders hurt and your eyes hurt. You take your glasses off and polish them, squeezing your eyes shut like that will stop the pain.  
  
It’s probably time for a new prescription.  
  
You slide them back on and look at the pottery. It’s strange. You know there was life on this planet before, giant birds with teeth like knives and lizards who stalked the continents before they vanished.  
  
Then, there was nothing for millions of years.  
  
It’s a long gap between one thing and another, and it’s not just in the animal world. There’s a break in the horizon of the past, some ninety thousand years ago, and no one knows why.  
  
You sit, matching your potsherds, trying to make the image on these pieces become clearer. There are people below a light. You can see nearly one whole person. On another piece that’s steadily becoming larger and actually shaped like a round-bellied container, it looks like there are more people, these ones painted pale and their faces obscured by time and wear.  
  
They are standing in something that might be water, but for the small bones that poke out of it. There are pockmarks where gems once were, in the clothing of these tiny terracotta people.  
  
You pass your fingers over both sections and stare at them, a chill making its way up your spine. You think of how every culture on this planet has a story about creatures that can suck the life right out of you and wonder, exactly, where did these pot sherds come from?  
  
In ten thousand years, it won’t matter, because you will be standing beside those people who can remove the life-force of billions with the flick of a finger and you will be one of them. There is an event horizon in the past, one hundred thousand years ago. It takes that long for the population of this planet to reach its peak.  
  
The Harvest is part of a cycle, like everything, and you help to seed the planet once everything is cleared away.  
  
You wonder if these new humans, who will grow over the next hundred thousand years, will whisper stories in the night of mythical creatures who remain ever-young and ever-beautiful, their empire built on the backs of humans too unevolved to realize there might be some truth to those tales.  
  
“Abathur, it’s ready.” Your uncle has come to lead you away. There’s a new batch ready, made from that no-longer human habited world. There’s a thought that swirls around your head: are there the descendants of the people she loved, so long ago, in this new batch? It’s a very small thought. Twenty-nine years is a very short time compared to millennia and you’ve always been very adaptable.  
  
It wasn’t long before you took to the Abrasax family ways, and it’s never too early for a bath, especially when you have the product freshly harvested.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_synkrasis :: blending youth and age_

They are young, so very young when Mother takes them to visit Earth for the first time, not long after the seventh harvest has taken place. She holds tight to her brother’s hand, unwilling to admit nervousness. This is her planet. This has always been her planet, no matter which version of her it was.  
  
Mother’s dress sweeps the dust out of their way as they walk through the streets of a once-great city, its shining buildings now empty, its streets now home to animals moving through places they were once denied. Birds fly overhead and settle where they please. The prey animals, herbivores and rodents, have already begun to take back the green places.  
  
They come to a fountain that no longer bubbles up water. Round-limbed representations of the human form create a tableau out of shining black stone, their hands joined together. The lip of the fountain is clear of dust even as its basin chokes on it.  
  
“Come here,” says Mother. She sweeps her skirts to the side and holds out her hands, one for each of them.  
  
It reminds her of snow, of Mars where she was born this time, of the scant number of years she spent before the system recognized her and returned her to the Abrasax estates. She doesn’t know where her brother was born, only that he came into this universe at the exact same time that she did. They are linked, closer than close, in this cycle of Recurrences.  
  
Mother reaches into the fountain and scoops dust up in her bronze hands. She holds both fists out.  
  
“This,” she says, turning her hands and opening them up so that the wind can get at the last pieces of this cycle of humanity, “is our eternity.”  
  
They watch the dust slide through her fingers.  
  
Seventy millennia later, she kills him for the presumption of trying to take her estates. The House of Abrasax has many duties to itself, including an unwritten one to seize as much as they can. That one is not supposed to apply to the family. Grasping and as greedy as they are, being an Abrasax is a duty with rules that can never change.  
  
She remembers the dust and feels safe knowing that he will, at least for some time, be sentenced to that same fate.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_hedone :: bliss, if only for a short time_

“I want it,” he says, tugging at the crystals on her skirts. She flicks them out of his grip, sending them whirling around her legs, tight enough to restrict her walking.  
  
“No,” she says. This is unseemly. The funeral was less than two days ago, and here he is, already pouting like the child he no longer is. “It’s not yours.”  
  
He looks at her, eyes hateful. “If she doesn’t come back, it will be mine.”  
  
“Cousin Elenes will return, and soon. The grave holds no barriers for an Abrasax.”  
  
She strides away, skirts spiralling out to clear a path.  
  
“Maybe it should,” he says, and she pretends not to hear it. Her nephew is a hateful boy. She despairs at the possibilities that lie in the future, times when he could be her elder, even her father. He would remember. She knows he would, even though Recurrences are only on a genetic level.  
  
She tells herself this, even as she prepares for her own end and her nephew, now with millennia of his own behind him, smiles sweetly. She hopes that the next time she sees his face they won’t be siblings. She doesn’t think she could stand being that close to him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_ageratos :: unageing (through the power of regenx-e)_

She counted up how old she was once. She went into the records and tracked down every single one of her Recurrences, just to add up the numbers.  
  
It’s an astoundingly large figure, and in that astoundingly large figure are billions upon billions of deaths. People who are just like her. Stupider and younger and blinder than her, but still of the same base genetic code.  
  
She brings the number up and stares at it.  
  
There’s a speck of dust on the screen.  
  
How many humans did it take to make a handful of eternity?  
  
“Your Majesty?” One of the servants. She can’t remember their names. It doesn’t matter.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“His Recurrence has been found.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“A child named Balem. He is on his way here.”  
  
Younger than her, then. Cousin, twin, brother, husband, uncle, father, and now: son. She idly wonders about the others. There is supposed to be a girl and another boy. Her genetic code has told her that. She thinks that he may have been her son first, that she had been mother to the three of them. She has been an aunt, a cousin, a daughter, a wife.  
  
The names don’t matter. He will be whatever he will be. He is an Abrasax, the same as her.  
  
It just seems like that fact doesn’t matter as much anymore.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_theletos :: what has been longed for_

You’ve always had a fear of fire. It’s an unnatural fear, one that belongs to a boy of centuries past, when there was actual fire, not the flickering images on screens that fill the niche for decorative fireplaces.  
  
In your dreams, the world always ends in fire and so, when the fire comes from the heavens, from the people descending from spaceships that are only now visible, only now showing up on the radar screens of Earth, you are the only one who is unsurprised.  
  
You laugh as everything burns and you, somehow, survive.  
  
It’s weeks later when a pair of people descend upon the planet, dressed in diamonds and rubies, jewels flickering fire-red to white-hot as they move.  
  
You are fairly certain that you are the only one left on Earth, so you watch from behind trees.  
  
“Come down from there, brother!” Her voice is sweet, her expression guileless, and you nearly fall.  
  
Her companion laughs. “Is it so very strange to be the youngest, now?”  
  
You have no idea what they’re talking about.  
  
“Come out!” The woman calls, crouching down.  
  
Very slowly, you peer out from around the trees.  
  
“Hello, brother,” says the man. His smile is closed-mouthed and doesn’t reach his eyes. “Would you like to come home, now?”  
  
There is no one else left on this planet and you, at not even twenty years old, are the last one left. You step further away from the tree, still out of reach. Something grey flickers out of the corner of your eye.  
  
“Do you dream of fire?”  
  
You flinch back, and the woman laughs.  
  
“Of course he does, Titus. Just look at him. He’s half-mad already.”  
  
Titus taps his finger to his lips. “Kalique.”  
  
She rolls her eyes and rises to her feet and looks at you without an expression on her face.  
  
“It’s time to come home, brother.”  
  
“Jove,” you say, and it’s the first word that you’ve spoken in weeks. Months? You can’t speak above a whisper. “My name is Jove Wise.”  
  
The woman, Kalique, laughs at that like it’s the funniest thing in the universe. “Of course it is.”  
  
Three is a holy number, and you make up that last part, sliding into a place that was waiting for you.  
  
It takes years before you realize that the three of you are an incompleteness, that there is supposed to be a fourth.  
  
You are a tetragrammaton, balanced only when the last will join you again. She's out there, somewhere, floating in the darkness between the stars, but she will come again. The four of you cannot leave this universe and its economy alone for long.

**Author's Note:**

> Within each section:
> 
> sophia: —  
> bythios: seraphi + balem + kalique + titus  
> mixis: seraphi + kalique  
> akinetos: seraphi  
> synkrasis: seraphi + balem + kalique  
> anthropos: titus  
> henosis: titus + kalique  
> hedone: kalique + balem  
> autophues: kalique  
> ageratos: seraphi  
> monogenes: seraphi abrasax + jupiter jones  
> theletos: balem


End file.
